Lies of the Drama
By Neil Blackadder

A Lie of the Mind
By Sam Shepard
The Acorn Theatre
410 W. 42th St.
Box office: 212-279-4200

I recently saw two New York productions
back to back that capture for me a key distinction between theater
that is easily digestible yet uninspiring and theater that is
puzzling yet resonant. The Broadway production of Donald Margulies'
new play Time Stands Still was smoothly executed but
left me feeling little more than indifference. Sam Shepard's 1985
play A Lie of the Mind, revived Off-Broadway by the New
Group, struck me as messy, elusive, but captivating.

The script of Time Stands Still is
artfully put together. The four characters are quite distinct,
which gives the actors plenty of scope for depicting them in all
their seriousness and humor. Through the main couple's work overseas
as photographer and writer, Margulies' play deals with issues
that go beyond everyday life in America. At intermission, I felt
engaged. I was interested in Sarah, a photographer played by Laura
Linney who can't stop doing what she does even though it has nearly
got her killed once and might well do so next time. I figured
Margulies was going to have something else momentous happen to
her. I was also intrigued to find out what he would do with the
play's younger woman, Mandy, an apparent ditz who unhesitatingly
reveals her naivety but whom--as performed by Alicia Silverstone--it
was hard not to like for that very straightforwardness.

And
what did happen? The younger woman simply embraced motherhood,
and Sarah resumed her work, at the cost of her long-term relationship
with the writer, who had his fill of chasing after violence overseas.
Obviously, with a play portraying journalists who go to places
like Iraq, there's a danger of preaching-to-the-choir liberalism.
Who wouldn't feel some admiration for those who risk life and
limb to inform us about the horrors taking place elsewhere? Margulies
even has Jamie, the writer, loudly bemoan the kind of theater
that lets the well-meaning well-to-do feel good about themselves
because they're listening to accounts of atrocities. In the end,
though, I felt that his critique applied pretty well to Time
Stands Still. The resolution packed no punch. The four characters
either stayed where they'd been or moved in a slightly different
direction, and in no case was that surprising or affecting.

As I watched Time Stands Still,
I felt that I quickly recognized the characters, knew who they
were, and hoped that they would surprise me; they didn't. The
following evening, at A Lie of the Mind, I didn't feel
I knew where any of the characters' journeys were going to take
them. That applied not only to Beth and Jake, both presented in
different ways as mentally impaired, but also to the more settled,
older characters, their parents. I love that feeling of not being
able to predict where a play's story is going, though of course
that needs to go along with our caring about what happens
to the people. With
Margulies, I did care about what happened to Sarah and Mandy,
but not that much, and I felt utterly indifferent to the men.
Watching A Lie of the Mind, I found myself in the odd,
troubling, interesting position of caring not only about a woman
who had just been badly beaten by her husband but also about the
messed-up man who did the beating. In Shepard, all the people
seemed real and vulnerable and scared, in a way stupid, yet somehow
understandably so. At times Karen Young's performance as Jake's
mother Lorraine pushed so hard in the direction of comedy that
it didn't ring true, but in the end even that choice worked for
me as a strange, flawed wackiness. I also liked how Lorraine contrasted
with Beth's mother, Meg, played so touchingly by Laurie Metcalf.
We are set up to think of her as crazy early on, but later she
gets some of the sanest lines in the play.

With Margulies' play, I kept not believing
the conversations taking place among the characters. I'd have
accepted it more if only the sharp-tongued Sarah had kept coming
out with clever one-liners, but instead all of them did. I hate
that feeling of the playwright having thrown up a ball for the
actor to obligingly bat out into the audience so that the spectators
can knowingly laugh. And it was all so even -- all the characters
got to say their piece, they didn't talk over each other, the
dramatic action rose and fell obediently. And of course there
were Big Scenes, confrontations -- almost all of which left me
thinking "How come they never said this to each other before now?!"

In Act II, Sarah told Jamie about a "flashback"
she just had, about how a woman prisoner yelling at her reminded
her of another woman yelling at her earlier in a war-zone. Yet
the whole device seemed to exist just to provide the playwright
with material; it didn't actually make anything happen to or with
the character. In other instances too, Margulies set up potentially
engaging plot points, only to develop them in an unconvincing
and unresounding way. In an early scene, Jamie told Sarah about
an article he was working on about horror movies, and she brilliantly
dismantled the half-baked argument he planned to make. But by
part way through Act II, Jamie had committed himself fully to
his horror-movie research, and basically ceased to exist as a
rounded, engaging character. In Shepard, where I experienced the
characters as driven by obsessions and misled by blindnesses,
I might have found Jamie's giving himself up to this passion poignant
and fascinating. But because Margulies had situated Jamie in a
world of well-spoken individuals who can articulate their motivation,
it struck me instead as weak character development.

Time
Stands Still is a single-set, small-cast play that will probably
get produced by many regional theaters in coming seasons, with
slightly different designs that nevertheless won't depart much
from the look of this premiere production. I'm prepared to believe
that lofts in Williamsburg look just like this setting, but I
would have loved it to do more than just sit there looking authentic.
How refreshing it was to watch Ethan Hawke's production of A
Lie of the Mind unfold and aspire to visual goals loftier
than those of a sitcom set. Lie's primary design motif--a
back wall covered in stuff--was perfect, especially since
it wasn't over-employed. Mostly it too just sat there, yet it
resonated. The production also had live music that was played
on odd objects such as a chair and a beer bottle with metal strings
attached, and there was country-ish (but not in the least sentimental-sounding)
singing during several transitions. All this worked beautifully
because it didn't merely illustrate; it complemented the action
without intruding upon it.

The experience of watching Margulies' play
did have one thing in common with that of watching Shepard's:
it reminded me of how much more psychologically interesting female
characters tend to be. The two men in Time Stands Still
end up seeming like lightweights. One, Jamie, gives up on adventure
and ambition (and in fact never had all that much drive to begin
with), and just fizzles out -- like the play! The other (ably
performed by Eric Bogosian, but still) is really just put in place
at the top of the show and stays where he's been put -- a function
more than a character. Sarah, on the other hand, did interest
me, as did event-planner-turned-mom Mandy. But in A Lie of
the Mind, Shepard didn't just make his female characters
more compelling than the men; he acutely suggested some general
truths about men and women. He showed that men are much more likely
to get fixated on a particular notion, like emulating their fathers,
or a particular activity, like hunting. The women, meanwhile,
wanted connection with other human beings, and kept striving for
it even after it was proven futile. The spectacle of that vain
pursuit can be extremely poignant. Such was the case not only
with poor Beth, who didn't really understand why she shouldn't
just get married to her husband's brother, who was much nicer
to her, but also with the mothers, with their mixture of resilience
and resignation. When Beth's father kissed Meg after she helped
him fold up the American flag, she remarked that he hadn't done
that in 20 years. That line grew naturally, believably, out of
the relationship we had been presented with. Margulies also depicted
a relationship between a man and a woman stretching back over
many troubled years, yet nothing that happened between Sarah and
Jamie struck a chord like that.

At
one point in the second act of Time Stands Still, Jamie
put his bicycle helmet back on and, right before exiting, knocked
the top of the helmet, for no clear reason. My companion remarked
that the play and production needed more of that sort of unaccountable
yet meaningful action. For me, one problem with the skillful kind
of playwriting Margulies practices is precisely that it is so
skillful--everything fits into place. His is a representation
of the world in which everything is integrated into the whole,
whereas Shepard's is one in which loose ends are allowed, even
encouraged, to remain.

Related to that is the issue of what images
are created on stage. Margulies' play signally failed to make
this a priority -- until, maybe, sort of, the (uninspired) final
moment when Sarah points her camera out at the house. Shepard
offered a wealth of evocative images, such as Jake in boxer shorts
and pilot's jacket, with the American flag around his shoulders,
or, later, that flag wrapped around a gun-barrel. In the latter
part of Shepard's play, two characters repeatedly tussle over
a blanket that has been subtly invested with multiple meanings:
it's a source of warmth that one sick character desperately needs,
an emblem of the other's possession of this domestic space, etc.
In Time Stands Still, Sarah and Jamie's laptops were
just laptops. I'll remember Baylor and Jake's tug-of-war with
an orange and black blanket for a long time, how it looked on
stage, the thoughts and associations it prompted. I won't remember
Sarah and Jamie's laptops the day after tomorrow.